Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
126 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
47 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
43 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
4 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
47 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

Charting Censorship Resilience and Global Internet Reachability: A Quantitative Approach (2403.09447v2)

Published 14 Mar 2024 in cs.NI

Abstract: Internet censorship and global Internet reachability are prevalent topics of today's Internet. Nonetheless, the impact of network topology and Internet architecture to these aspects of the Internet is under-explored. With the goal of informing policy discussions with an objective basis, we present an approach for evaluating both censorship resilience and global Internet reachability using quantitative network metrics, which are applicable to current BGP/IP networks and also to alternative Internet network architectures. We devise and instantiate the metric on the network topology of multiple countries, comparing the BGP/IP network, an overlay network using a waypoint mechanism for circumventing undesired nodes, and the path-aware Internet architecture SCION. The novelty of the approach resides in providing a metric enabling the analysis of these aspects of the Internet at the routing level, taking into account the innate properties of the routing protocol and architecture. We demonstrate that the Internet topology matters, and strongly influences both censorship resilience and reachability to the global Internet. Finally, we argue that access to multiple paths accompanied with path-awareness could enable a higher level of censorship resilience compared to the current Internet, and reduce the centralization of Internet routing.

Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (39)
  1. J. L. Hall, M. D. Aaron, A. Andersdotter, B. Jones, N. Feamster, and M. Knodel, “A Survey of Worldwide Censorship Techniques,” Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet-Draft draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-09, Jan. 2023, work in Progress.
  2. C. S. Leberknight, M. Chiang, H. V. Poor, and F. Wong, “A taxonomy of internet censorship and anticensorship,” Fifth International Conference on Fun with Algorithms, 2010.
  3. S. Aryan, H. Aryan, and J. A. Halderman, “Internet censorship in iran: A first look,” in 3rd USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 13).   Washington, D.C.: USENIX Association, Aug. 2013.
  4. R. Ramesh, R. S. Raman, M. Bernhard, V. Ongkowijaya, L. Evdokimov, A. Edmundson, S. Sprecher, M. Ikram, and R. Ensafi, “Decentralized control: A case study of Russia,” in Network and Distributed System Security.   The Internet Society, 2020.
  5. K. Singh, G. Grover, and V. Bansal, “How India censors the web,” in Web Science.   ACM, 2020.
  6. B. Marczak, N. Weaver, J. Dalek, R. Ensafi, D. Fifield, S. McKune, A. Rey, J. Scott-Railton, R. Deibert, and V. Paxson, “An analysis of China’s “Great Cannon”,” in Free and Open Communications on the Internet.   USENIX, 2015.
  7. P. Gill, M. Crete-Nishihata, J. Dalek, S. Goldberg, A. Senft, and G. Wiseman, “Characterizing web censorship worldwide: Another look at the OpenNet Initiative data,” Transactions on the Web, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015.
  8. J. Karlin, S. Forrest, and J. Rexford, “Nation-state routing: Censorship, wiretapping, and BGP,” arXiv, 2009.
  9. A. Shah, R. Fontugne, and C. Papadopoulos, “Towards characterizing international routing detours,” in Proceedings of the 12th Asian Internet Engineering Conference, ser. AINTEC ’16.   New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2016, p. 17–24.
  10. A. Edmundson, R. Ensafi, N. Feamster, and J. Rexford, “Nation-state hegemony in internet routing,” in Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, ser. COMPASS ’18.   New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018.
  11. Y. Rekhter, S. Hares, and T. Li, “A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4),” RFC 4271, Jan. 2006.
  12. M. C. Tschantz, S. Afroz, Anonymous, and V. Paxson, “SoK: Towards grounding censorship circumvention in empiricism,” in Symposium on Security & Privacy.   IEEE, 2016.
  13. S. Khattak, T. Elahi, L. Simon, C. M. Swanson, S. J. Murdoch, and I. Goldberg, “SoK: Making sense of censorship resistance systems,” Privacy Enhancing Technologies, vol. 2016, no. 4, pp. 37–61, 2016.
  14. K. G. Leyba, B. Edwards, C. Freeman, J. R. Crandall, and S. Forrest, “Borders and gateways: Measuring and analyzing national as chokepoints,” in Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, ser. COMPASS ’19.   New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019, p. 184–194.
  15. H. Roberts, D. Larochelle, R. Faris, and J. Palfrey, “Mapping local Internet control,” in Computer Communications Workshop.   IEEE, 2011.
  16. L. Salamatian, F. Douzet, K. Salamatian, and K. Limonier, “The geopolitics behind the routes data travel: a case study of Iran,” Journal of Cybersecurity, vol. 7, no. 1, p. tyab018, 08 2021.
  17. H. B. Acharya, S. Chakravarty, and D. Gosain, “Few throats to choke: On the current structure of the internet,” in 2017 IEEE 42nd Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 2017, pp. 339–346.
  18. X. Xu, Z. M. Mao, and J. A. Halderman, “Internet censorship in China: Where does the filtering occur?” in Passive and Active Measurement Conference.   Springer, 2011, pp. 133–142.
  19. R. Ensafi, P. Winter, A. Mueen, and J. R. Crandall, “Analyzing the Great Firewall of China over space and time,” Privacy Enhancing Technologies, vol. 2015, no. 1, 2015.
  20. M. Wrana, D. Barradas, and N. Asokan, “The spectre of surveillance and censorship in future internet architectures,” arXiv, 2024.
  21. A. Edmundson, R. Ensafi, N. Feamster, and J. Rexford, “A first look into transnational routing detours,” in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, ser. SIGCOMM ’16.   New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2016, p. 567–568.
  22. ——, “Characterizing and avoiding routing detours through surveillance states,” CoRR, vol. abs/1605.07685, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07685
  23. J. Obar and A. Clement, “Internet Surveillance and Boomerang Routing: A Call for Canadian Network Sovereignty,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013.
  24. S. Bechtold and A. Perrig, “Accountability in future internet architectures,” Commun. ACM, vol. 57, no. 9, p. 21–23, sep 2014.
  25. C. Krähenbühl, S. Tabaeiaghdaei, C. Gloor, J. Kwon, A. Perrig, D. Hausheer, and D. Roos, “Deployment and scalability of an inter-domain multi-path routing infrastructure,” in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, ser. CoNEXT ’21.   New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, p. 126–140.
  26. B. Trammell, J.-P. Smith, and A. Perrig, “Adding path awareness to the internet architecture,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 96–102, 2018.
  27. L. Gao and J. Rexford, “Stable internet routing without global coordination,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 681–692, 2001.
  28. Sparks, Neo, Tank, Smith, and Dozer, “The collateral damage of Internet censorship by DNS injection,” SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 21–27, 2012.
  29. R. Fontugne, A. Shah, and E. Aben, “The (thin) bridges of AS connectivity: Measuring dependency using AS hegemony,” CoRR, vol. abs/1711.02805, 2017. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02805
  30. Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, “AS Relationships (serial-2).”
  31. ——, “Inferred AS to Organization Mapping Dataset.”
  32. RIPEstat, “RIPE Stat.”
  33. MaxMind, “GeoIP2 Anonymous IP Database.”
  34. Freedom House, “Internet Freedom Scores.”
  35. G. Baltra and J. Heidemann, “What is the internet? (considering partial connectivity),” University of Southern California, Tech. Rep., 2022.
  36. P. Gill, M. Schapira, and S. Goldberg, “Modeling on quicksand: Dealing with the scarcity of ground truth in interdomain routing data,” SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., vol. 42, no. 1, p. 40–46, 2012.
  37. M. Wählisch, T. Schmidt, M. de Brün, and T. Häberlen, “Exposing a nation-centric view on the german internet – a change in perspective on the as level,” in International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement, vol. 7192, 03 2012.
  38. K. Kohler, “One, Two, or Two Hundred Internets? The Politics of Future Internet Architectures,” CSS Cyberdefense Reports, 2022.
  39. S. L. Murphy, “BGP Security Vulnerabilities Analysis,” RFC 4272, Jan. 2006.

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

Ai Sparkles Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Summarize Now